Apple keeps changing their payment rules, making compliance a real headache.
We’ve faced three rejected transactions this week for unclear reasons, and support is slow to respond.
What strategies have you found effective? Are you relying on third-party processors or just going with Apple?
Sticking with Apple’s system is often easier. Third-party options can create user friction.
Rejection issues often arise from missing receipts or server validation errors. Make sure to check your validation flow carefully.
Following Apple’s documentation closely can help avoid most payment headaches.
Third party processors usually cause more problems than they solve. Apple’s annoying but at least it’s predictable.
Apple support takes forever. Test everything twice before submitting.
Had similar issues with a gaming app. The rejections usually happen because of duplicate transaction IDs or sandbox vs production environment mix-ups.
We started pre-validating payment data on our backend before sending it to Apple. Cut rejections by about 70%.
Also worth checking if your users have payment methods that work in their region. Apple blocks certain card types depending on the country, and their error messages don’t always make that clear.
One trick that helped - we added a retry mechanism with exponential backoff. Sometimes Apple’s servers are just overloaded and the same transaction goes through 30 seconds later.
Build a fallback system for when Apple rejects payments.
I’ve seen apps lose thousands in revenue waiting for Apple support to respond. Set up server-side receipt validation that catches issues before they become rejections.
Keep detailed logs of every transaction attempt. When something gets rejected, you’ll have the data to fix it fast instead of guessing what went wrong.
Apple’s rules change but the core validation process stays the same.